...when garden and seed catalogs and planning out your plot aren't enough to distract you. You swing by the garden plot and traipse through the pock-marked and ice-ridden paths all the way to the back of the community gardens JUST TO LOOK at your own plot. Not, mind you, to accomplish any purpose; nor even to photograph it to document the change of seasons. Nope, just to look. Little wooden work-table, check. Miscellanea safely ensconced, check. Random scraps of wood and the spare wooden chairs that the Duchess salvaged last season, check. Raspberry canes need further trimming in spite of my late season pruning, check. Then, I turned around and...returned to my car.
Yeah, it's bad. And for the record, I'm a native of this region, and never required a groundhog to tell me "whether or not" on February 2nd we'd have 8 more weeks of winter. There is no doubt. We WILL have 8+ more weeks of winter, and possibly a surprise snowstorm in May, thank you very much, just enough to keep you on your toes.
*sigh*
Where are my easter eggs?
Showing posts with label cold. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cold. Show all posts
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
A Ruckus in the Bracken
Columbus day weekend we finally got a break in the weather; some warm, sunny weather each day, so I headed up to the beach with a book and my knitting to enjoy the sand and the Atlantic while it wasn't too windy yet. By November it will be rainy and windy and chilly, so this was a real blessing. On Saturday it was so still that there were plenty of birds and it was really quiet. I took a different path down the back side of the hill towards the upriver side of the beach, and enjoyed walking through the saltmarsh. Low tide, I found a spot on a nice sandbar with a little slope, wandered around looking at funny footprints of various critters (not only seagulls, but other birds, as well as lizards, snakes and marks made by the dune grasses as they twirled in the breezes, making faint circles in the sand). Read a Murakami book, "After Dark" - a nice break from the other stuff I've been reading lately. Purely fictional and speculative, thoughtful and slow-paced.
On the walk back up the path, near sunset, I managed to startle a group of deer in the underbrush - I couldn't see them but the sound of their hooves in retreat and all the crashing through the thick bracken was unmistakable.
Returned on Sunday, a little earlier in the day - got a fair amount of knitting done and finished the Murakami, but had to retreat a little further up the beach: there was a wedding going on at the Castle Hill estate, and the party was impressively loud for 1pm - I couldn't believe the sound of their voices alone would carry that far, and they were only a bunch of twenty-somethings playing volleyball on the beach! - still, it was scaring away the usual wildlife. No deer today, clearly. Just to clarify based on earlier discussions...: Deer in the woodlands and the saltmarsh are wildlife; deer in my garden (or yours) are edible pests.
Monday was a little overcast, so I declared it domestic catch-up day. Laundry and gardening, mostly gardening. Lots of weeding to do, as I'd neglected the garden plot once the rains, lightning storms, and various family and personal commitments had conspired to keep me away from the garden...okay I just plain neglected it: what with one thing and another, week by week, I'm realizing it really isn't that easy to get over to the garden plot, as it's > 1mile away from where I live, and if I don't take the longer commute-route home...or if it's dark when I leave the office...I've been learning how many things can be obstacles to getting in decent garden time. Including forgetting to bring jeans & a tee shirt (can't garden in heels and slacks. not so much anyway.) And then past a certain point, there's no point planting hot-weather crops in...early August! Plant biology is flexible, but not that flexible.
Instead, on Monday I opted to weed, put some of the garden to bed, prepping the beds for next spring, and transplanting some of my tender plants to a location where I reconstructed my haphazard little cold frame made of lots of scrap windows. Hurray for junk-day! I have so many stones, that I've started constructing a wall of stones to retain heat and it's leaning against a pair of scrap screen-windows. In theory, this will provide both thermal insulation and a little necessary ventilation. We'll see - it's all an experiment, but hopefully I'll get away with it.
In the process of digging up the various beds, weeding, and general maintenance, I was excited to find not only vigorous earthworms, but a tiny garlic bulb, a cucumber, 7 red onions, and a whole bucketful of various types of potatoes! The Peruvian blues (purple potatoes) and also red potatoes, and some white fingerling looking potatoes, but for all I know they could be russets, but the skins on these look too thin. At any rate I found so many that I was able to bring home a bunch, gift some to mum, and plant a bed for next year as well. Very exciting stuff, for me at least. Plus my herb garden has largely soldiered on bravely through the weed invasion. That bodes well, as next year I plan on planting more herbs and leaf-bearing plants, and fewer veggies, the better to avoid the temptation of the jerks who've broken into our garden plot this year to rifle through the Duchess' tupperware tool bin and steal fertilizer and other easily portable goods, leaving big footprints in her planting beds along the way. Unbelievable, when you think about it, but apparently quite common (!) that people would break in through a fence just to steal vegetables. And mind you, Belmont is not, repeat NOT, a low-rent district, so it's not as though anyone in the neighborhood has any trouble putting food on the table. So, there's my little rant. Apparently though, it's been going on a long time, and happens to community gardeners the world over, according to some of the books I've read.
Still, I'm excited about the potatoes, and finally feeling enthused about gardening again - the rain for some reason had really discouraged me this summer. I like cool weather gardening though, and I enjoy meeting people at the community garden. Monday I met a woman who's focused her garden on medicinal herbs; she teaches about herbalism in Boston and we had a great conversation about uses and misunderstandings of herbal remedies, lichens, plants, mushrooms, bees, western and eastern medicine, and so on. So, I'll be back at the community garden plot in the spring, and maintaining it off & on through the cold season, in spite of my frustrations this summer.
On the walk back up the path, near sunset, I managed to startle a group of deer in the underbrush - I couldn't see them but the sound of their hooves in retreat and all the crashing through the thick bracken was unmistakable.
Returned on Sunday, a little earlier in the day - got a fair amount of knitting done and finished the Murakami, but had to retreat a little further up the beach: there was a wedding going on at the Castle Hill estate, and the party was impressively loud for 1pm - I couldn't believe the sound of their voices alone would carry that far, and they were only a bunch of twenty-somethings playing volleyball on the beach! - still, it was scaring away the usual wildlife. No deer today, clearly. Just to clarify based on earlier discussions...: Deer in the woodlands and the saltmarsh are wildlife; deer in my garden (or yours) are edible pests.
Monday was a little overcast, so I declared it domestic catch-up day. Laundry and gardening, mostly gardening. Lots of weeding to do, as I'd neglected the garden plot once the rains, lightning storms, and various family and personal commitments had conspired to keep me away from the garden...okay I just plain neglected it: what with one thing and another, week by week, I'm realizing it really isn't that easy to get over to the garden plot, as it's > 1mile away from where I live, and if I don't take the longer commute-route home...or if it's dark when I leave the office...I've been learning how many things can be obstacles to getting in decent garden time. Including forgetting to bring jeans & a tee shirt (can't garden in heels and slacks. not so much anyway.) And then past a certain point, there's no point planting hot-weather crops in...early August! Plant biology is flexible, but not that flexible.
Instead, on Monday I opted to weed, put some of the garden to bed, prepping the beds for next spring, and transplanting some of my tender plants to a location where I reconstructed my haphazard little cold frame made of lots of scrap windows. Hurray for junk-day! I have so many stones, that I've started constructing a wall of stones to retain heat and it's leaning against a pair of scrap screen-windows. In theory, this will provide both thermal insulation and a little necessary ventilation. We'll see - it's all an experiment, but hopefully I'll get away with it.
In the process of digging up the various beds, weeding, and general maintenance, I was excited to find not only vigorous earthworms, but a tiny garlic bulb, a cucumber, 7 red onions, and a whole bucketful of various types of potatoes! The Peruvian blues (purple potatoes) and also red potatoes, and some white fingerling looking potatoes, but for all I know they could be russets, but the skins on these look too thin. At any rate I found so many that I was able to bring home a bunch, gift some to mum, and plant a bed for next year as well. Very exciting stuff, for me at least. Plus my herb garden has largely soldiered on bravely through the weed invasion. That bodes well, as next year I plan on planting more herbs and leaf-bearing plants, and fewer veggies, the better to avoid the temptation of the jerks who've broken into our garden plot this year to rifle through the Duchess' tupperware tool bin and steal fertilizer and other easily portable goods, leaving big footprints in her planting beds along the way. Unbelievable, when you think about it, but apparently quite common (!) that people would break in through a fence just to steal vegetables. And mind you, Belmont is not, repeat NOT, a low-rent district, so it's not as though anyone in the neighborhood has any trouble putting food on the table. So, there's my little rant. Apparently though, it's been going on a long time, and happens to community gardeners the world over, according to some of the books I've read.
Still, I'm excited about the potatoes, and finally feeling enthused about gardening again - the rain for some reason had really discouraged me this summer. I like cool weather gardening though, and I enjoy meeting people at the community garden. Monday I met a woman who's focused her garden on medicinal herbs; she teaches about herbalism in Boston and we had a great conversation about uses and misunderstandings of herbal remedies, lichens, plants, mushrooms, bees, western and eastern medicine, and so on. So, I'll be back at the community garden plot in the spring, and maintaining it off & on through the cold season, in spite of my frustrations this summer.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Control over watering...
ilex raised a good point in a comment today, and I was going to directly reply in a comment, but then I realized how long my comment was going to be, I thought I'd better just post on the subject.
She asked about whether it was a difficult transition to go from container gardening (where I get to control the plant's water intake, i.e., not too much or too little) to planting outdoors and therefore being largely subject to rain, and I think that's a valid question. I hadn't given it a whole lot of thought, as such.
In the past, my containers always outside, or on windowsill; in fact, one year they were in full sun all day long on a second-story balcony, so while they avoided bugs to a great degree (yay!) drying out was a major problem: I had to soak them every single evening without fail. In addition, containers are less tolerant of extremes of temperature and moisture: they're smaller (in the sense that they have no access to other water sources - they only have what you give them) and so are more prone to drying up, particularly the clay pots, given that they have more exposed surface area. Likewise, they are vulnerable to the cold - a particular consideration in the exposed position on that second-story balcony I had. My housemates and neighbors thought I was nuts that year; I collected baseball-sized rocks as thermal mass to surround the containers in the early spring (read: February). It worked, but yeah, they thought I was nuts. Until I was eating salads harvested from those pots, so...
So, sun (or lack thereof, in the case of one place I lived) and pests brought in by others (e.g. houseplants from the supermarket bought by a roommate, introduced aphids and whiteflies) were the problems I dealt with, rather than water-control being an advantage.
As for the outdoor garden - so far, I have either lugged jugs of water into the plot, or had access to water spigots (when they got turned on for the season; they were off for the first several weeks). We've had a fair amount of rain recently, so for the immediate future I'm not concerned. I'm also covering the seedlings, and plan on investing in some chickenwire cages to cover my rows, to protect them from the ravages of the woodchuck.
These nifty ones (picture above) belong to another gardener at my community gardens, and are made of better-quality, more expensive screening (rabbit-fencing?). I think for my purposes chickenwire will do alright.
That said, there are in fact a number of community gardens in the area of Boston. the ACGA has a nifty search engine that, if you are an apartment-dweller like me, will help you search, by zipcode, for a garden near you.
I chose this garden because it lies directly along my daily commute to and from work, and is about a mile away from home. Granted, there's a BIG hill between us, but it's not the end of the world. This makes it easier to maintain the garden during the more extreme weather: I had planned all along to stop by in the evenings on my way home and water the plants (with jugs of water, since I haven't invested in a hose). I have a watering can with a decent spout that won't slosh the little seedlings right out of their homes, so... I think I've got it covered.
I guess the answer is, I'm more concerned about the woodchuck and bugs than about the plants drying out during the hot months, or about either too much or too little rain. If it rains too much, I have means to cover the rows and steer the water away (those raised beds plus the storm windows which I can prop up to give them a little shelter). If it rains too little, I plan on watering them regardless. The disadvantages are bugs and other pests, at least so far as I can see at this point.
Later in the season, I'm told that our meadow is a bit of a cold sink, so that factored into my decision to invest in some lumber in the fall to construct a couple cold frames.
I hope that helps clarify some of the factors I considered when I decided to transition from the containers to the garden.
She asked about whether it was a difficult transition to go from container gardening (where I get to control the plant's water intake, i.e., not too much or too little) to planting outdoors and therefore being largely subject to rain, and I think that's a valid question. I hadn't given it a whole lot of thought, as such.
In the past, my containers always outside, or on windowsill; in fact, one year they were in full sun all day long on a second-story balcony, so while they avoided bugs to a great degree (yay!) drying out was a major problem: I had to soak them every single evening without fail. In addition, containers are less tolerant of extremes of temperature and moisture: they're smaller (in the sense that they have no access to other water sources - they only have what you give them) and so are more prone to drying up, particularly the clay pots, given that they have more exposed surface area. Likewise, they are vulnerable to the cold - a particular consideration in the exposed position on that second-story balcony I had. My housemates and neighbors thought I was nuts that year; I collected baseball-sized rocks as thermal mass to surround the containers in the early spring (read: February). It worked, but yeah, they thought I was nuts. Until I was eating salads harvested from those pots, so...
So, sun (or lack thereof, in the case of one place I lived) and pests brought in by others (e.g. houseplants from the supermarket bought by a roommate, introduced aphids and whiteflies) were the problems I dealt with, rather than water-control being an advantage.
As for the outdoor garden - so far, I have either lugged jugs of water into the plot, or had access to water spigots (when they got turned on for the season; they were off for the first several weeks). We've had a fair amount of rain recently, so for the immediate future I'm not concerned. I'm also covering the seedlings, and plan on investing in some chickenwire cages to cover my rows, to protect them from the ravages of the woodchuck.
These nifty ones (picture above) belong to another gardener at my community gardens, and are made of better-quality, more expensive screening (rabbit-fencing?). I think for my purposes chickenwire will do alright.That said, there are in fact a number of community gardens in the area of Boston. the ACGA has a nifty search engine that, if you are an apartment-dweller like me, will help you search, by zipcode, for a garden near you.
I chose this garden because it lies directly along my daily commute to and from work, and is about a mile away from home. Granted, there's a BIG hill between us, but it's not the end of the world. This makes it easier to maintain the garden during the more extreme weather: I had planned all along to stop by in the evenings on my way home and water the plants (with jugs of water, since I haven't invested in a hose). I have a watering can with a decent spout that won't slosh the little seedlings right out of their homes, so... I think I've got it covered.
I guess the answer is, I'm more concerned about the woodchuck and bugs than about the plants drying out during the hot months, or about either too much or too little rain. If it rains too much, I have means to cover the rows and steer the water away (those raised beds plus the storm windows which I can prop up to give them a little shelter). If it rains too little, I plan on watering them regardless. The disadvantages are bugs and other pests, at least so far as I can see at this point.
Later in the season, I'm told that our meadow is a bit of a cold sink, so that factored into my decision to invest in some lumber in the fall to construct a couple cold frames.
I hope that helps clarify some of the factors I considered when I decided to transition from the containers to the garden.
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